What is the difference between agentic coding and traditional coding assistants?

A traditional assistant suggests code and waits for approval. With agentic coding, the agent reads the codebase, plans a sequence of actions and carries them out without approval at every step. The model moves from suggesting to executing tasks.

How long does a coding agent work without intervention?

Published work reports sessions lasting several hours. Rakuten reports a refactor carried out over seven consecutive hours in an open source library of 12.5 million lines. The actual duration depends on the complexity of the task and the permissions granted to the agent.

Do you need to reorganise your development team to adopt agentic coding?

No. Claude Code runs in your existing terminal. The only structural adjustment is writing a CLAUDE.md file that holds the team's conventions and rules. Adoption happens one task at a time.

Which projects are best suited to agentic coding?

Repetitive work with explicit rules: migrations, test generation, pull request review, dependency updates. Situations that call for creative judgement are still better handled in supervised mode.

How does an agent take a project's own rules into account?

Through the CLAUDE.md file, which documents the conventions, business rules and permitted workflows. The agent reads it at every session and aligns its actions with those rules, with no extra configuration.

How do you get started with Claude Code?

Install the tool, create a CLAUDE.md file at the root of the project, then start a session with a precise instruction. The agent analyses the context, plans and executes. The first session needs no particular setup.

How do you build an agent with Claude Code?

For a simple need, Claude Code's built-in subagents are enough. For an agent called from an application, the Claude Agent SDK exposes the same infrastructure through an API: you define the instructions, the tools and the scope, then you deploy.

Which tools connect to Claude Code?

Any tool exposed by an MCP server: Git repositories, databases, team messaging, ticket tracking. Claude Code also has access to the terminal, the file system and git commands. The scope of each server is validated before it goes live.

Claude Code and agentic coding: how it works, MCP and best practices

Claude Code and agentic coding: how it works, MCP and best practices for your IT systems

TL;DR: Agentic coding turns the development tool from a suggester into a task executor: the agent reads the codebase, plans and executes. Salesforce reports a migration of 33 endpoints, estimated at 231 person-days, delivered in 13 days. The CLAUDE.md file holds the rules, the MCP protocol holds the connections. The question for leadership is not the tool, it is which of these uses deserve to be industrialised.

A migration estimated at 231 person-days, delivered in 13 days. That is the result Salesforce Engineering reports after rolling out agentic workflows with Claude Code across 33 endpoints migrated to a cloud architecture (Salesforce Engineering, June 2026). Agentic coding shifts the software engineer's day-to-day work: sequential assisted coding gives way to a model where the agent executes tasks end to end. This guide covers how Claude Code works, the Claude Agent SDK, the MCP protocol and deployment best practices for teams that are scaling up.

What is agentic coding?

From autocomplete to autonomous agent: how have coding tools evolved?

Development tools have evolved over three generations. The first, autocomplete, offers inline suggestions. The second, contextual chat, answers the question you ask. The third, agentic coding, crosses a different threshold.

With traditional assisted coding, the tool suggests and waits. With Claude Code, the agent reads the project files, plans a sequence of actions and executes each task without letting errors slip through. Task execution replaces passive suggestion. For a development team, this is a change in kind in how tooling is used day to day.

How does a coding agent's reasoning and action loop work?

Agentic coding rests on a loop of reasoning, action, then verification.

1. Analysing the project context: code files, git history, dependencies 2. Planning the sequence of actions that reaches the goal 3. Executing the changes and autonomously fixing the errors it runs into

This cycle repeats without manual intervention, including on the longest workflows.

Where does enterprise adoption of agentic coding stand?

Published data confirms the move from experimentation to production. The 2026 State of AI Agents report finds that 91% of the companies surveyed use AI-assisted coding tools in production, and that 54% of respondents from large organisations say they are very optimistic about agent adoption, against 38% at smaller organisations. The barriers cited come in this order: integration with existing systems for 46% of respondents, data access and quality for 42%, security and compliance for 40%.

This ranking has a practical consequence. The main barrier is not the model, it is the connection to the information system. That is also where the gap between a demo and a use that lasts is decided.

Claude Code in agentic mode: how it works and how it is built

The CLAUDE.md file: the agent's persistent memory and rules

Claude Code reads a CLAUDE.md file at the root of the project to give each session its context. This file holds the lasting instructions: code conventions, business rules, permitted workflows. The agent rereads and interprets it every time it is used.

This mechanism removes the need to restate the context over and over. It is the agent's long-term memory and the first rule of any serious use of Claude Code in production.